Three US cities in the running for the 2024 Olympics

US Olympic leaders have started contacting Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington about the possibility of bidding for the 2024 Games and believe the demise of Boston’s candidacy will be ‘‘ancient history’’ by the time the host city is selected in 2017.

In an interview Saturday with The Associated Press, US Olympic Committee chairman Larry Probst said a decision will be made by the end of August on which of three cities should replace Boston as the American contender in a race that already features four European cities….

San Francisco has the same logistical and geographic problems as Boston, only more so. It’s hillier and the tip of the peninsula is more isolated.

There’s one subway tunnel within the City, shared by Muni Metro and BART, which diverge beyond downtown into only one tunnel each (I think). The in-city elevated highway stretches hit by the 1989 earthquake were not rebuilt but replaced with ground-level boulevards. (Dedicated Olympic VIP lanes would just not be practical.) Owning and operating a car is a challenge comparable to having one in Manhattan, i.e. even greater than in Boston or D.C. I haven’t been back in fifteen years, but I think that the transit system (the Muni) is better than Boston’s.

You’d have to talk about the whole Greater Bay Area and then lose much of the compactness argument, since in the middle of the Bay Area is an uninhabited body of water whose area measures in the hundreds of square miles. You could take the highway or train from S.F. to venues on the peninsula (e.g. Stanford Stadium, site of some World Cup and Women’s World Cup matches), but otherwise you’re dependent on a few bridges and the BART subway to the East Bay.

The security challenges are different from Washington, D.C.’s but easy to imagine for anyone who watches (or even knows just the premise of) disaster movies. Or remembers the 1989 World Series.

It would be great to have an Olympics in S.F. (whose Fleishhacker Pool, now sadly deteriorated, did serve the 1932 L.A. Olympics), but I just don’t see how it could work.

It would certainly cost a lot that local government coffers could not easily provide.

What I read in an L.A. Times column (ironically thanking Boston), reprinted in The Boston Globe, is that L.A. has a persuasive argument both for Angelenos/Californians and for the USOC/IOC: it’s already built for an Olympics (1932 & 1984). No vast land clearances or construction projects needed, as in London, Sochi or Rio.

(In Boston, one question was: where do we put a 100,000 sq.ft International Media Centre or a Velodrome? Those who know cycling, Paris or Holocaust history know what a vélodrome is, but at least 95% of Bostonians didn’t know before last month. There hasn’t been one in the Boston area for the better part of a century.)

Fewer Bostonians were favorable to the idea than unfavorable, once it was expressed as specific bids rather than a general aspiration.

Boston Olympics 2024 couldn’t convince Boston and Massachusetts taxpayers and commuters already burned badly by the Big Dig that the Boston Games wouldn’t end up costing them a very pretty penny, as well as several weeks of unmanageable disruption.

As for my speculations about San Francisco, I’d be very interested in hearing from Keith, who’s in the Bay Area.

Los Angeles may have no NFL team right now, but it has many more facilities, some of them built for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, than the Bay Area.

The Marathon bombing hadn’t crossed my mind, this evening, but while it was on some minds, Bostonians were assured that Homeland Security & co. would be assuming and controlling most of the security. Boston held a Democratic National Convention (with protestors confined to a laughably obscure “free speech area”) without incident.

Remember that the Boston Marathon, although it attracts thousands from across the country and the globe, is a quintessentially local event, and it got hit by local kids. So it’s not the international aspect that would provoke the most worry.

The situation for Washington, D.C., would be different. (The 1996 Atlanta Centennial Park bombing came not from any international terror network, but from a Southern fanatic, Eric Rudolph.)

SAN FRANCISCO — There is much to relish about the Bay Area, from the intoxicating landscape to the blissful lack of humidity.

One thing is not perfect, though: the daunting nature of the region’s public transportation system, a patchwork of more than 20 operators spread across nine counties and 101 municipalities that have yet to spawn a cohesive map.

As housing costs here continue to escalate, with growing numbers of people moving farther afield in search of affordability, the disjointed nature of the region’s transportation fiefs, each with its own fare structures and nomenclature, has become the topic of increasingly intense debate among transportation policy experts.

A study released this year by SPUR, a Bay Area urban planning and policy think tank, encapsulated much of the public frustration on the subject and has been widely discussed on blogs and in public forums, including one at the venerable Commonwealth Club of California.

“Ninety percent of the people in the Bay Area are essentially tourists when it comes to transit,” said Ratna Amin, SPUR’s transportation policy director. “They don’t use it.”…